


my heart in your hands, it’s yours now

by Dancyon



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Gen, M/M, Protective Andrew, Snow, Snow Day, neil doesn't know how to take care of himself, sick neil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-22
Updated: 2018-03-22
Packaged: 2019-04-06 07:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14051892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dancyon/pseuds/Dancyon
Summary: Neil is used to the heavy snowfalls in Canada, to freezing temperatures in their car as they run for their lives.All things considered, he thinks he might have forgotten what snow feels like now that he is safe at Palmetto, and he has definitely forgotten how to not get sick.





	my heart in your hands, it’s yours now

**Author's Note:**

> written for [trey](https://cinnamon-anal.tumblr.com/) because i love him

Neil remembers the snow in England, soft and white and slower than the one that hit them in Canada that one time they weren’t able to find shelter, the cold creeping into their fingers and freezing the car, scaring them half to death when they realized they couldn’t get away this time. Not like with the car. If his father’s people had found them, they would have had to run through the woods with the snow reaching their knees.

They survived that time, and they survived many winters after that, but sometimes between his childhood and his years on the run, he forgot by the time his third year at Palmetto came around. He forgot how cold the air feels around you and he got used to winters without snow in South Carolina.

He forgot what cracked hands feel like, how rough lips can get.

Most of all, he forgot how to stay safe, but wasn’t that a reoccurring accident with him since the moment he signed with the Foxes?

The last day of the year would turn into the first day, seasons would follow each other, and Neil Josten would always, without a doubt, forget to take care of himself.

The break was not over yet, they still had a couple of days left before they had to go back to their normal everyday routine when the first hint of snow covered the ground like a thin sheet of blank paper, more than they’d gotten in the last five years all together.

Life slowed down. The Foxes took out their scarves and mittens. They found their old beanies. They went around in jackets.

Neil didn’t, the cold of his memories so far away that it made him feel as though he could beat the weather into submission because it was nothing compared to the nightmares of his past.

He woke up feeling like Death itself, ears ringing and his skin overheated, the covers of his bunk bed pushed to the bottom of it. It was the middle of the night. The sound of Kevin’s soft breathing confused him for a second, his brain convinced it was in a car in Canada, sharing body heat and the cold with his mother.

Staring at the dark ceiling above him, he suddenly realized Andrew was awake in the bed beneath him, probably glaring a hole through his mattress and waiting for a feverish Neil to wake up and stop moving around in his sleep.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered, his apology interrupted as he suddenly shot upright and tried to cough his lungs up.

Andrew scoffed mockingly and got up, mindless of the noise they were probably making since they would need a cannon or practice to wake up Kevin. “Shut up you idiot.” He helped Neil jump from his bed, the ladder lost somewhere in their dorm room since the beginning of the semester.

With a hand on his warm neck, Andrew guided him to the bathroom just in time before he started retching.

Neil held onto the toilet for dear life, but all he could feel in that moment was Mary Hatford’s ghost touching his skin with ice cold fingertips. She took him back to his sickbed in England when he was 7, tea on his nightstand and snowflakes slowly falling down the window, and to that car in Canada when he was 14, fear and pain and guilt closing his throat.

The hand combing his hands back smelled of smoke and death and his eyes were unfocused as he called out to a woman who would never answer again, apologizing for something he had no control over.

Andrew was lost and worst of all, he was useless. He held Neil’s hair out of his face until he came back to himself enough to realize where he was and look at Andrew with wide glossy eyes.

“I’m sorry.” He tried to say. “You can leave now. It’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

Andrew looked at him with a blank face. “You’re always fine, aren’t you? But not this time. This time you will have to not be fine and let me do my thing.” Let me help you. Let me do whatever I can to make this easier, better, less hard for you. Please let me help you. The words he would never allow himself to think, suspended in the air for a Neil who was too sick to catch them.

After looking at his – lover, boyfriend, soul mate – with wonder Neil nodded slowly, the small gesture hitting the inside of his head like a painful punch before he had to lean over the toilet again.

In the morning, Andrew drove them to Columbia, where they spent the weekend. Andrew covered Neil with so many blankets on the bed that the redhead almost asked him if they bought some recently because he sure didn’t remember owning this many.

But he didn’t say it, because he had warm tea on his nightstand like that time in England, and snowflakes covered the window to his left.

Andrew fretted around him with a restless sort of energy he had never seen before – except that one time years ago, in a motel room in Baltimore, where Andrew was all scared fury and something that would one day be the blossom of trust.

Neil laid back in his blanket nest, drunk his tea and hummed in quiet contentment as the past slowly died behind him to open up a future where Andrew held him in his arms through a cold and combed his hair out of his face with quick, cool fingers.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on fighting the rest of the virus off to get rid of that almost panicked look in Andrew’s eyes, born from something he could not fight.

He felt fear and the ghost of death give way to hope.


End file.
